use of candidates who are preparing for the Cambridge Examination for women over 18, and also of any books recommended by the teachers, which bear upon the subjects they are reading.

2. The books will be sent to subscribers by book post pre-paid. The carriage of the books when returned must be paid by the subscriber.

3. Three volumes (not necessarily of the same work), may be had at the same time, and kept for any period not exceeding three months.

4. All subscriptions will commence on the 14th of October in each year, and no books will be exchanged or given out after the 14th of June following, but books previously issued may be retained till the 14th of October.

This additional burthen voluntarily assumed by the public school teachers is a proof of the capacity for work of Englishmen in all professions, one of the standing wonders of every American who sees his English friends at their work. The explanation is not an easy one, and yet a visit to a great English public school goes a great way to help one on in his inquiries. The training of the boys is so well made up both of intellectual and physical parts, that the one part is not educated at the expense of the other, or where this is done, the brain is made to give way to the bone and muscles, so that the English boy is rarely stunted by too much brain-work and too little field sport. The excess of athletics which has been largely deplored of late, is in no wise a proof that boys cannot be good scholars as well as good cricketers, or good boating men, but it is an evidence of the fact that just as soon as men begin to overtax their strength in the hot rivalry of their open air exercises, watchful men warn them to stop it.

Then comes the great business of subdivision of labor, carried to its absolute limits in public school life, where, subject to the control of the head master, whose teaching work is very small, although very important, each master or teacher has the constant care of a small number of boys, in their whole life and business, besides taking regular classes for instruction in set branches. Thus the boy is never without a watchful eye, and his "dame," as the tutor, in whose house and under whose care he lives, is still lovingly called, gets more work out of his boys in their leisure hours

than do his regular masters in school hours, yet each takes care that the full task allotted to him is fully accomplished. With this constant training of one mind and master on the one hand, and with the varying influences of the different masters through whose schools or forms the boy advances, until he comes under the moulding hand of the head master, the boy is never allowed to rest satisfied with doing only as well as do the other boys in his class, he has the wholesome rivalry of the boys who live with him in his tutor's or dame's house. There is always a double process of teaching and being taught, for in his ambition to make his house, that is the lads under his tutor's roof and care, do their best, he takes some part in their work, both at the books and in the field, and "coaches" them and learns in teaching and helping them to learn to do their work. This close intimacy is in the main one of the real reasons of the intense fondness and sturdy affection with which Englishmen look back on their public school days.

The lad who comes at very tender years to his public school begins at once to live two lives; as part of the great body of pupils, he slowly finds his place, and in slow progress of years works his way up in his classes. As one of the "house" in which he makes his home, he becomes the member of a family of never more than twenty or thirty boys, who live in the closest intimacy, but always under the most constant watchfulness of their tutor, whose business it is to look after their every movement and habit, as well as their studies. The "class" or form of the school may often change, as it is almost sure to do, from term to term, but the "house" varies only by occasional losses and gains, and as lads of the same family succeed each other in steady course of descents, there are even instances of rooms in a public school and in one of the colleges at a university having been occupied by one family for a hundred years. The tone of feeling and thought is that of a family in which one generation hands down to the next all its traditions, its faiths and its acts, and these in turn are as strong in their influence, if they are good and wholesome, as the actual prescribed laws of the school or the positive rules of the house. Each house has its own course of instruction, both in the regular school work and in as many different directions as the zeal and industry and predilection of the master in charge can suggest, and although the actual number of teach

ing hours in an English public school is very small, the rest of the time is largely used for the work that is done in the house under the tutor's own eye and hand. Now, just as all this house work is training for school, so each house has its own cricket and boat and other field sports, and in them the lads are trained in a sort of subsidiary way for the greater clubs that make the schools famous and serve to maintain the wholesome rivalry with other public schools. The contests between the 'Varsity boat clubs, racing crews, and between the Eton and Harrow cricket "elevens," are almost world famous; but there are similar "matches" constantly on foot between the other public schools, which stand on something of the same social and scholarly level, and all these are but outward illustrations of the same kind of contests (in scholarship) which are constantly going on for the prizes at the universities between the lads who come from the public schools. Haileybury has its list of honormen and prizemen, each year's catalogue gives them in detail, and it thus does its share in supplying the abundant material which is always ready to fill the great and growing opportunities furnished by the universities for increased numbers of students. The universities

and the public schools are in fact part of the system of higher education, and in this respect it would be well if in this country we could establish a somewhat similar connection between our schools, both those in private hands and those of our public school system, and the local university nearest to them. Cannot some such plan be devised to give a greater field of usefulness to our own university?

I

SYRACUSE REVISITED.

WENT to Syracuse when I was a Sophomore. It was a callow brood of thirty, if I remember right, that set sail from Athens, led by a keen and rare Grecian of the older type of scholarship. Upon benches to which those of the Athenian triremes were as down, we followed the great fleet out from the harbor of the Piraeus on its track to the shores of Sicily, saw the disembarking, the marches, the ups and downs of the weary siege, until the beleaguering army was itself blockaded, broken up and cap

tured; nor did our journey end until the suffering and groans had ceased from the quarry-prisons and the plaintive songs of the captives had died away from the Syracusan streets.

I will not say how many years had gone by, but the memory of that former journey was still fresh, when I found myself one hot February afternoon in a lazy Sicilian train that sauntered down the eastern coast of the island. Skirting the base of Etna, we had passed Catania, and the black boulders that Polyphemus hurled after Ulysses, lying amidst the surf where they fell, and were entering upon a country of sterile hills and valleys, when my companion, a polyglot Russian in spectacles and a Baedeker, suddenly looked out of the window with the remark, "I think that shall be Sirakooza," and, sure enough, there before us lay the familiar sickle-shaped island in bright relief against the blue back ground of the Mediterranean.

There is a heaven of the Italian imagination, dearer than all the visions of the Florentine, dearer than the gorgeous pictures of the Church, dearer even than "far niente," waiting for some later mystic to throw the gates ajar, through whose crevices only faint hints escape glimmerings-such as one sees in dim remembrance, dreaming of Italy.

In rattling carts, drawn by the smallest of celestial ponies, the righteous canter eternally up and down the pave of the nine circles, brandishing whips of inxehaustible torpedo power; dogs there are in shadowy troops to bark behind them and be run over in that happy land; they race, they intertwine, they crash together in the mazy course, and from beneath their phantom wheels cherubim plunge for dear life, screaming, into the jasper archways.

A faint realization of this bliss was the career of our delighted driver, when, having rescued our small luggage at the station and deposited it at the prehistoric Locanda del Sole, we started forth. on a tour of exploration. I had had some vague plans of doing matters in a sequence of my own, but while sitting down to the inevitable omelet that responded to a call for something to eat "subito," a head peered in at the door with the remark, "Wantagaide?" and finding that no refusal was made, the body followed with the further ejaculation, "Aispickinglish." The Sclavonian and I looked at one another, hesitated, and were lost. It was

Felice Vallerio, condescendingly Anglicized by himself into Philip Vallery, to meet the requirements of barbarian tongues. Felice the Imperious, voluble et tenax propositi, who had stormed us unwary, and in whose hands we were as wax.

After all I don't know but that it is as well to inoculate one's self, in these cases of guide and flower-girl epidemics, by employing or investing. The unimpressible British obstinacy may perhaps succeed in danning the torrent of their pertinacious eloquence, but I, more nervous and less firm, have found immunity cheaply purchased by submission; and the lordly protection of your affable swindler is a study of itself.

Two strangers in Syracuse !! Windows and doorways are filled with Phrygian caps and shining female heads. The wrangling of the fish-market lulls. Even the ardor of the chase, that neverending occupation of Italian mothers and their prototypes in the Zoological Gardens, flags for a moment as the blue-eyed forestieri whirl along through draw-bridges, demi-lunes, scarps and all the pedantic intricacy of seventeenth century fortification, till the city. gates are passed. An open meadow with a solitary shattered column in the centre, and at last a dusty lane, hedged by huge thorny cacti on either hand.

The crazy wagon brings up with a jerk in front of a yellowwhite façade, and Felice announces the church of San Giovanni. "What is here?" asks my Russian, who has been diligently studying his Baedeker and finds no special mention of the edifice. He does his duty manfully by the conventional Objects of Interest, but there are points where a line must be drawn even by the most long-suffering.

"The entrance to the Catacombs, perhaps they are not in the book." Felice looks at the guide-book system from the extreme conservative cicerone point of view, as an infringement upon the right divine of the Italian nation to swindle the coming, fleece the parting guest. He therefore rejoices over every omission to notice the smallest object which occurs in those almost omniscient red volumes "Verlag von K. Baedeker, Koblentz."

But the Catacombs were there, marked with the asterisk which indicates something specially worth attention, and poor dilapidated San Giovanni was there too, so we pulled aside the heavy leather that swung before the door and stepped in. A faint aroma